Free Motion Embroidery Artists I Admire

There are many different styles of free motion embroidery.  The beauty of the skill is that once you've learned the basics you can do so many different things with it.  I thought it would be fun to share with you some of my favourite free motion embroidery / textile artists so you see some the different styles in a bit more detail.

Firstly has to be Katie Essam.  It was seeing Katie's work at a local craft fair a few years ago that brought free motion embroidery to my attention. As well as selling her gorgeous work she was advertising workshops and I immediately decided I wanted one as a birthday present.  You can read about my experience on the workshop in this blog post.

Katie describes herself as a mixed media textile artist, inspired by everyday beauty.  She combines freehand machine embroidery, appliqué, paint, crochet and more to create her original textile pieces.

Her pieces are bright, colourful and full of texture and detail. 

You can find Katie's website here. She has also written a brilliant book "Layered and Stitched Pictures", which I highly recommend.


Next I'd like to introduce you to Emma Giacalone, a textile artist I discovered through Instagram.  Emma's work is simply beautiful, incredibly detailed and often focuses on positivity and inspiring messages. 

Her food pictures take familiar, often iconic packaging and give it a quirky twist and "Finding Inspiration" maps do the same for the good old A-Z road atlas.

You can find Emma's website here, and her Instagram here.


Amanda Stinton is another Instagram find - it's where I get my creative fix from these days.  Amanda's lovely work is another take on free motion embroidery, which is almost collage like in the way she layers fabrics - sometimes overlapping tiny pieces - and thread to create colourful and highly textured pictures.  She uses coloured threads to great effect and creates shading as you would with different coloured paints.

You can find Amanda on Instagram here.


Finally for today is Ali from Hawkins and Hill, yet another Instagram find!  I think I found Ali through the gorgeous clutch bags she makes, which often feature some form of free motion embroidery.  The pieces of her work I've chosen to share feature a vintage sewing pattern envelope stitched from fabric, and an old school music cassette tape stitched from vinyl, proving once again that it's possible to use a wide variety of materials in your work. 

I love the way Ali has 'coloured in' the pattern envelope design with thread, rather than using fabric applique.

Ali's Instagram is here, and you can find her Etsy shop here. 

I hope you've enjoyed my little trip around the world of free motion embroidery today.  There are plenty more artists out there creating in lots of different styles, so hopefully I'll do another one of these posts later in the year. 

In the mean time, I'd love to know which one of the artists I've featured today is your favourite and why.

Next week I'll be back with a new tutorial for you.    

* all of the above images are shared with the artists permission.